Twitter has announced a new plan that will allow it to censor users’ tweets on a country-by-country basis if governments object to them. It says the policy is an attempt to keep doing business in countries, such as China, that do not welcome all expression.
On the company’s blog Twitter said it will now withhold offending content within the specific country that censors the language, while leaving it unaltered for the rest of the world. It will also post a censorship notice whenever a tweet is removed.
A special board formed to advise the federal government on the clash between Global Positioning System receivers and LightSquared’s proposed cellular/satellite communications network has concluded there are “no practical solutions or mitigations” that would allow the two to coexist on adjacent segments of the radio spectrum.
The National Space-Based Positioning Navigation and Timing Committee, in a letter released this afternoon, said it had reached the “unanimous conclusion” that the LightSquared network would “cause harmful interference to many GPS receivers” as well as a GPS-powered ground-alert system overseen by the Federal Aviation Administration.
Based upon this testing an analysis, there appear to be no practical solutions or mitigations that would permit the LightSquared broadband service, as proposed, to operate in the next few months or years without significantly interfering with GPS. As a result, no additional testing is warranted at this time.”
Recall that LightSquared’s business strategy is based not on new technology, but on using its political connections to obtain a competitive advantage. That’s why they aren’t giving up despite all the technical findings against them: they think their politicians still might prevail.
Content creators have a legitimate interest in protecting their property. With the break-the-internet bills hopefully going to defeat, is there another, better way to do it?
ASIDE: Some have said that Hollywood and its ilk are liberal institutions and we should let them swing in the wind. I despise that bunch as much as anyone, and yes, I know that that is exactly how the Democratic party operates, but I don’t think we should stoop to that kind of Chicago-style politics. The right thing to do is the right thing to do, even if it benefits Hollywood.
Darrell Issa (R-CA) and Ron Wyden’s (D-OR) OPEN bill might be right way to do it. I can’t speak to all the details, but the basic concept seems workable: Rather than censor the Internet, OPEN would go after the finances that make piracy profitable.
What makes this attractive to me is that is puts the solution in the same space as the problem. The Internet is not broken; it is a tool for transmitting data and it works well. Content piracy is a financial problem and the solution should be situated in that space.
And if Hollywood isn’t satisfied with that, they can swing in the wind.
Facebook is sharing all its users’ private status updates and messages with Politico, an on-line publication focusing on politics. This is supposed to be okay, because all that material will be reviewed only by computers, not by people.
Personally, I would find that reassurance un-reassuring, even if I believed it, which I’m not sure I do. But it doesn’t really affect me, because I already recognize that nothing I put on Facebook is private.
An interesting legal battle is ongoing over whether a person can be forced to reveal a computer password, or whether she is protected from doing so by the Fifth Amendment’s protection against self-incrimination.
Under existing case law, the latter position seems stronger to me. The controlling case seems to be Doe v. United States. At issue in Doe was whether someone could be forced to sign a consent directive allowing foreign banks to disclose some information the government wanted. The court’s opinion wrote:
We do not disagree with the dissent that “[t]he expression of the contents of an individual’s mind” is testimonial communication for purposes of the Fifth Amendment. . . We simply disagree with the dissent’s conclusion that the execution of the consent directive at issue here forced petitioner to express the contents of his mind. In our view, such compulsion is more like “be[ing] forced to surrender a key to a strongbox containing incriminating documents,” than it is like “be[ing] compelled to reveal the combination to [petitioner's] wall safe.”
The analogy to a safe’s combination came from the dissent, which said:
A defendant can be compelled to produce material evidence that is incriminating. . .But can he be compelled to use his mind to assist the prosecution in convicting him of a crime? I think not. He may in some cases be forced to surrender a key to a strongbox containing incriminating documents, but I do not believe he can be compelled to reveal the combination to his wall safe — by word or deed.
So the question is whether a password is material evidence like a strongbox key, or the contents of a mind like a safe’s combination. I think it’s clearly the latter.
Cracked writes that video games are getting much better (warning: adult language):
Gamers tend to complain a lot about the state of modern gaming. . . But then I stopped and realized: We have all of these amazing, fantastic, borderline magical creations in our hands that, in many ways, dwarf all the wildest predictions of yesteryear — and we’ve got the [temerity] to stand around and [complain] that they’re taking too long to load. . .
NASA’s scheme (subscription required) for getting its next Mars rover to the surface sounds awfully complicated, but it sure will be cool if it works:
Curiosity’s size makes getting it safely onto the Martian surface tricky. Previous rovers have deployed parachutes to slow their descents, and have then crashed into the ground using airbags to cushion their impacts. Curiosity is too massive for that approach to work. Instead, NASA hopes to deposit it on Mars using a contraption it has dubbed a skycrane.
As with the other rovers, Curiosity’s mother ship will rely on heat shields and air-resistance, and then on a parachute, to slow its arrival. But at an altitude of 1.6km a specially designed descent stage bearing the rover will drop away from this vehicle. The descent stage has eight rocket motors on its corners. These will slow its fall to a relatively sedate 0.75 metres a second. When it is about 20 metres above the surface, the rover will be lowered from it on wires and deposited gently onto the Martian landscape. The cables will then be cut with explosives, the descent stage will fly off and crash land elsewhere, and Curiosity will begin its mission.
OWS Exposed is a new web site that exposes the nature and misconduct of the Occupy Wall Street protests. It was immediately subjected to a denial of service attack. When it got back up, its servers were hacked, redirecting readers to 127.0.0.1. (I saw this myself.) It’s finally up and running now.
All of which tells us something about the supporters of Occupy Wall Street, without even going to the site.
Steve Jobs is being lauded as one the greatest inventors of our time. I don’t mean to diminish his achievements when I say that (as far as I know) Jobs didn’t invent any of the products he is famous for. I mean to stick up for the role of the entrepreneur.
Jobs was unquestionably one of the greatest entrepreneurs of our times. He didn’t design the iPod, iPhone, and so forth. He built a company that designed them, built them cost-effectively, got them into the hands of consumers, and in doing all that, changed our culture. That kind of talent is much rarer than the inventor.
I also want to stick up for the Apple innovation that has been largely forgotten by other Jobs eulogists. People remember the hardware, the iMac, iPod, iPhone, and iPad, but they forget the software. I want to remember the software; in particular, the OS X operating system.
Apple products now have the reputation for running smoothly. People forget that, before 2001, Macs were crap. The old Macintosh operating system was terrible. It was unstable and its file system was incompatible with every other file system in existence. (In contrast, Windows NT was relatively stable, and, starting in 1996, it had the same point-and-click interface that the Mac was known for.)
Under Steve Jobs (history buffs: I simplify slightly), Apple fixed the problem by scrapping Mac OS entirely. They built a new operating system with a brilliant design: real Unix underneath with a Macintosh veneer on top. The main thing about it is it actually works. And I say this as someone who doesn’t actually like it.
Wow. I have no idea if OnStar was a respected brand, but if it was, it sure won’t be much longer:
Navigation-and-emergency-services company OnStar is notifying its six million account holders that it will keep a complete accounting of the speed and location of OnStar-equipped vehicles, even for drivers who discontinue monthly service.
OnStar began e-mailing customers Monday about its update to the privacy policy, which grants OnStar the right to sell that GPS-derived data in an anonymized format.
Adam Denison, a spokesman for the General Motors subsidiary, said OnStar does not currently sell customer data, but it reserves that right. He said both the new and old privacy policies allow OnStar to chronicle a vehicle’s every movement and its speed, though it’s not clear where that’s stated in the old policy.
“What’s changed [is that if] you want to cancel your OnStar service, we are going to maintain a two-way connection to your vehicle unless the customer says otherwise,” Denison said. . . Canceling customers must opt of of the continued surveillance monitoring program, according to the privacy policy. . .
Collecting location and speed data via GPS might also create a treasure trove of data that could be used in criminal and civil cases. One could also imagine an eager police chief acquiring the data to issue speeding tickets en masse.
Passing on the OnStar service isn’t enough; you don’t even want their hardware installed. Thankfully, that’s easy to arrange. Just don’t buy GM.
The White House pressured Gen. William Shelton (commander of the Air Force Space Command) to change his testimony to favor a company, LightSquared, that wants to build a wireless network that could interfere with GPS signals. LightSquared is owned by a major Democratic donor.
A video shown on Chinese state television apparently reveals a cyberwar tool and shows it being used to attack a Falun Gong web site hosted in the United States. Unsurprisingly, the Chinese government has taken the video down (you can still find it on YouTube) and claims that the footage is fake.
If you use the Facebook app on an iPhone or other smart phone, it copied all your contact info and stored it on their servers. Read here for more, including an explanation of the incredibly (and no doubt deliberately) obscure process by which Facebook allows you to turn this off.
The Protect IP bill is a terrible idea and it needs to go away. It would allow the government to shut down web sites without any due process, and it would break the Internet for good measure. In short, this thing is a dream for tyrants. Kill it.
IPHONE users may soon be stopped from filming at concerts — as a result of new Apple technology. The leading computer company plans to build a system that will sense when people are trying to video live events — and turn off their cameras.
If this becomes a reality, I will be parting ways from Apple for good. Some things cannot be borne.
This isn’t just an issue for concerts and the like; this is an issue for any public event. Given that police in many places are already willing to break the law to keep people from recording their activities, can there be any doubt that they will be delighted to turn off cameras wherever they go. And that’s just the petty tyrants; then there are the real tyrants.
What really puzzles me is the mentality behind this. Have they forgotten who their customer is? They work for us, not for the concert promoters (and the dictators). It’s like the DVD player manufacturers who put in the “features” that prevent you from skipping to the main menu without watching ads. I paid for the player, not the studios! But this is worse than that. In that case, one could argue that the manufacturer was doing what was necessary for content to be available on DVD. That argument, implausible as it might be for DVDs, doesn’t wash at all for video recording. Are things going to stop happening in the world if Apple doesn’t prevent people from recording them?
A group of young MIT students has developed a new type of battery that runs on a rechargeable liquid fuel. The inventors call the fuel “Cambridge Crude,” and if the technology makes it to market, refueling an electric car could be as easy as pulling up to a pump. The batteries are powered by semi-solid flow cells, an innovative architecture that uses charged particles floating in a liquid electrolyte between two containers–one for storing energy and one for discharging energy. . .
The MIT News Office reports:
. . . Another potential advantage is that in vehicle applications, such a system would permit the possibility of simply “refueling” the battery by pumping out the liquid slurry and pumping in a fresh, fully charged replacement, or by swapping out the tanks like tires at a pit stop, while still preserving the option of simply recharging the existing material when time permits.
However, I would caution that this comes from the MIT press office, which has a history of over-hyping modest discoveries.
Last November, we highlighted the story of New York City teenager Fei Lam, who had managed to sell $130,000 worth of white iPhone 4 parts in just a few months to customers eager to get their hands on a white iPhone 4 has Apple continued to delay the release of the official model. Lam claimed that he had developed a secondhand relationship with someone at Apple’s manufacturing partner Foxconn who had been supplying him with parts. At the time, the report noted that Lam had been contacted by a purported private investigator who claimed that Lam was trafficking in stolen goods, and Lam’s site disappeared soon after.
Apple yesterday finally filed a lawsuit against Lam and his parents, claiming infringement and dilution of its trademarks and engaging in deceptive practices through his conversion kit sales through his website at whiteiphone4now.com.
I should mention at the outset that it appears the suit has been settled, and we don’t know the terms of the settlement. But I don’t need to know the terms to be outraged by this. I don’t know if Apple has a case under the law — but they shouldn’t have a case.
This kid was selling aftermarket parts, that’s all. There’s nothing unusual about that. It seems to me that this is Apple using a groundless lawsuit to drive a tiny competitor out of business. And if the suit actually has a basis in law, that’s even worse.
The New York Times is accusing Facebook of hypocrisy, advocating the use of real names in social networking but making anonymous attacks against Google.
The criticism is fair enough, but this shouldn’t surprise us. Corporations, like governments, are run by fallen humans and you’re making a mistake if you expect too much of them.
President Obama could soon have the ability to personally text message every single cell-phone-toting American -— whether they like it or not — with “critical emergency alerts” under a new federal program that civil libertarians and political opponents say is a Big Brother-like intrusion posing a high risk of political abuse.
Federal officials in New York yesterday unveiled the three-tiered emergency alert system that would blast messages about Amber Alerts, impending weather disasters and terror threats to mobile devices.
Cell-phone users could opt out of most alerts if they want to, but not the texter-in-chief’s presidential pages.
“It’s like the state rep sending out mailings about how wonderful they are,” said Tad Kasperowicz of the Quincy Tea Party. “President Obama says,’Here come the high winds and the thunderstorms’ and it’s not really an emergency, but, hey, he gets his name out to every cell phone in the area. I can see that. Absolutely. There’s potential for abuse there.”
Potential? I’d say near-certainty. Politicians already exploit every avenue they can find to get their names in front of you, from Congress’s franking privileges to governors stamping their name on billboards at every entrance to the state. Of course they will abuse this, but they’ve never had such an invasive tool before.
GPS mapping company TomTom apologized after it admitted selling data collected from its customers to Dutch police, the Financial Times reported Friday. The Amsterdam-based company sold data to cops in The Netherlands that was then used to help police set speed traps for motorists.
To be clear, TomTom wasn’t selling personally identifiable information (at least, such is not alleged), but what they did do is clearly against the interests of their customers.
The new iPhone software update removes the location tracking “feature”. To my knowledge, they still haven’t explained why it was there in the first place.
UPDATE (5/13): A reader points out the Apple press release. I’m still puzzled, though. The press release says:
The iPhone is not logging your location. Rather, it’s maintaining a database of Wi-Fi hotspots and cell towers around your current location . . .
The iPhone tracks all your movements using GPS, and keeps a record. Worse, that record is transfered to your computer when you sync your phone. Worse still, that record is persistent: when you migrate to a new phone, the record migrates with you.
Apple declined to explain what the hell they are doing.
Iron Dome, Israel’s new rocket defense system, has proven itself in action for the first time:
The Iron Dome counter-rocket defense system intercepted a Grad-model Katyusha rocket fired from the Gaza Strip on Thursday, proving its capabilities in combat for the first time.
IDF sources said the rocket was detected shortly after it was launched in the direction of Ashkelon, south of which a battery was deployed on Monday. Two Tamir interceptors were fired at the Katyusha and the first intercepted it, a senior Israel Air Force officer said. . .
The first Iron Dome battery was deployed outside Beersheba late last month after Hamas and Islamic Jihad fired more than 100 rockets and mortar shells into Israel in less than a week.
The European Union wants to improve your privacy, but there’s a little problem:
The commission said consumers should be informed “in a clear and transparent way” about how their data will be used. They should also have the right to fully delete digital information, like social networking profiles, and should be informed when their data has been used in unlawful ways, the commission added.
I guess I hadn’t been paying attention. I’ve been hearing people talk about a proposed Internet kill switch, but I assumed that it was either hyperbole or a fringe proposal. Nope. This is an actual bill proposed by Joe Lieberman (D-CT), Tom Carper (D-DE), and Susan Collins (RINO-ME).
Its supporters defend it thus:
Proponents of the bill say it is narrowly crafted and does not intend to limit speech but to eliminate the vulnerability of critical systems such as banks, the power grid and telecommunications from attacks by terrorists or agents of hostile countries.
Indeed, the bill specifically does not grant the president power to act unless a cyberattack threatens to cause more than $25 billion in damages in a year, kill more than 2,500 people or force mass evacuations. The president would have the ability to pinpoint what to clamp down on without causing economic damage to U.S. interests, for anywhere from 30 to 120 days with the approval of Congress, according to the bill.
“This is not Big Brother,” says Tom Kellermann, vice president of security awareness at Core Security Technologies, and a former security expert for the World Bank. “It’s not about shutting off the Internet, but taking a scalpel to command control to key services to protect them.”
Call me unreassured. Who issues the finding that one of this parade of horribles is going to happen, thereby allowing the president to shut down the Internet? The president, of course. The bill specifically prohibits judicial review, and the Congress merely has to be notified. So the limitations are meaningless.
Remember that the Democrats have made it clear that they believe that Sarah Palin can singlehandedly instigate a mass shooting merely by posting a web page calling for the defeat of some Democrats. Against that backdrop, it’s very easy to imagine a Democratic president deciding that Republicans communicating on the Internet are going to cause mass casualties.
Worse still, the proposal is not really for a nationwide kill switch. Such an extreme power could be used only in a legitimate emergency. Instead, the proposal would give the president a “scalpel”, with the power “to pinpoint what to clamp down on.” The president can easily choose precisely who to silence without inconveniencing the general public.
But the president would never do such a thing, right? Wrong. The administration is already shutting down tens of thousands of domains, without any due process at all, for literally no reason other than its confusion about how the Internet works.
Neither is the limitation of the power to dealing with “cyberattack” likely to be any protection. We have seen many times before how racketeering and money-laundering laws have been creatively interpreted to prosecute political activity, and that was with the approval of the courts. Here, the power of creative interpretation would lie with the same person who would exercise the power (remember, no judicial review). That’s no protection at all.
Happy New Year! Here’s hoping you’ll wake up in time to enjoy the first morning of 2011, as multiple users are reporting that alarms set within the iPhone’s default clock application aren’t going off as expected come January 1, 2011.
However, the apparent alarm bug only affects those who go about setting their alarms in a very specific fashion on their phones. For starters, though, the bug in question only affects those running iOS 4—specifically, versions 4.2.1, 4.1, and 4.0.2 of the OS so far. And the bug doesn’t affect alarms that have been previously set up to run as recurring elements on the phone. You’ll have to set a single alarm specifically for tomorrow or January 2 in order for your iPhone to completely ignore it.
That “very specific fashion” is, of course, the normal way one sets an alarm.
This is a very strange bug, and Apple still isn’t saying what happened. A lot of people talk about the technological superiority of Apple. This incident underscores what nonsense that is. Apple is very good at design, but their products are at least as buggy as everyone else’s, often worse.
SpaceX has successfully tested its Falcon 9 rocket, the first privately designed spacecraft capable of carrying astronauts into orbit. It’s a two-stage rocket, which is a little less cool than Scaled Composites’s SpaceShip One that won the X-Prize, but SpaceShip One wasn’t able to reach orbit.
A number of network neutrality advocates are coming out against the FCC chairman’s plan to impose network neutrality despite a court ruling forbidding it.
I don’t understand it (the article doesn’t provide much detail), but I’m glad to see it.
Michael Yon has posted a frightening presentation on the dangers of geotagging. The presentation is from the Army, but the risks apply to anyone with enemies.
Since the dawn of modern warfare, the best way to stay alive in the face of incoming fire has been to take cover behind a wall. But thanks to a game-changing “revolutionary” rifle, the U.S. Army has made that tactic dead on arrival. Now the enemy can run, but he can’t hide.
After years of development, the U.S. Army has unleashed a new weapon in Afghanistan — the XM25 Counter Defilade Target Engagement System, a high-tech rifle that can be programmed so that its 25-mm. ammunition detonates either in front of or behind a target, meaning it can be fired just above a wall before it explodes and kills the enemy. . .
[Lt. Colonel Christopher] Lehner said the first XM25s were distributed to combat units in Afghanistan this month. The 12-pound, 29-inch system, which was designed by Minnesota’s Alliant Techsystems, costs up to $35,000 per unit and, while highly sophisticated, is so easy to use that soldiers become proficient within minutes.
I first saw this weapon in the video game Ghost Recon 2. Good to see it’s finally become a reality.
Benjamin Edelman has done a study of Google search results that he says proves that Google intentionally biases their results. I’m not sure if his analysis proves the case or not, but it certainly doesn’t surprise me. Years ago a friend at Google told me that they adjust their search results to favor certain sites, like Wikipedia.
The Obama administration is developing plans that would require all Internet-based communication services — such as encrypted BlackBerry e-mail, Facebook, and Skype — to be capable of complying with federal wiretap orders, according to a report published Monday.
This may or may not be a good idea (I think not), but of one thing you may be sure: If this were President Bush’s proposal, the left (in which I include the mainstream media) would be going beserk. There would not be enough trees for all the editorials the New York Times would write.
I was all set to do a blog entry lambasting Microsoft for teaming with the Russian government to use charges (often bogus) of software piracy to persecute human rights organizations. The title was going to be Evil empire meets evil empire.
But Microsoft did the right thing. Within a day of the New York Times story, Microsoft issued a blanket license for human rights groups. The license applies automatically, without any need to apply. I have no doubt that Russia will find other ways to persecute its dissidents, but they won’t be able to use Microsoft to do it.
Popular Mechanics: Compact fluorescent bulbs just aren’t very good, and LED bulbs are $30-$50 each. Soon they will be mandatory, though. So when is the right time to start hoarding incandescent bulbs?
The online habits of most people who use the world’s dominant Web browser are an open book to advertisers. That wasn’t the plan at first.
In early 2008, Microsoft Corp.’s product planners for the Internet Explorer 8.0 browser intended to give users a simple, effective way to avoid being tracked online. They wanted to design the software to automatically thwart common tracking tools, unless a user deliberately switched to settings affording less privacy.
That triggered heated debate inside Microsoft. As the leading maker of Web browsers, the gateway software to the Internet, Microsoft must balance conflicting interests: helping people surf the Web with its browser to keep their mouse clicks private, and helping advertisers who want to see those clicks.
In the end, the product planners lost a key part of the debate. The winners: executives who argued that giving automatic privacy to consumers would make it tougher for Microsoft to profit from selling online ads. Microsoft built its browser so that users must deliberately turn on privacy settings every time they start up the software.
This is a particularly pungent example of a pervasive conflict-of-interest problem: “features” in software and consumer electronics that disadvantage the consumer who pays for the product.
The Obama administration is seeking to make it easier for the FBI to compel companies to turn over records of an individual’s Internet activity without a court order if agents deem the information relevant to a terrorism or intelligence investigation. . .
The administration wants to add just four words — “electronic communication transactional records” — to a list of items that the law says the FBI may demand without a judge’s approval. Government lawyers say this category of information includes the addresses to which an Internet user sends e-mail; the times and dates e-mail was sent and received; and possibly a user’s browser history. It does not include, the lawyers hasten to point out, the “content” of e-mail or other Internet communication.
Of course, the government can already demand to know who you are talking to on the phone. That’s troubling, to be sure, but at least there is a limit to what they can learn from that, because there is a sharp distinction between the phone number and the content of the call. For electronic communications, such a distinction is very hard to maintain. For many communications (e.g., web browsing, or friend requests), the recipient of the message is the entire substance of the message.
Will those on the left who condemned the Bush administration’s policy on phone records step up to condemn this far-worse overreach? We will see who was honest, and who was just scoring political points.
In a 13-page reply to questions posed by Representative Ed Markey from Massachusetts and Congressman Joe Barton from Texas, Apple said it collects GPS data daily from iPhones running OS 3.2 or iOS 4. The phones collect the GPS data and encrypt it before sending it back to Apple every 12 hours via Wi-Fi. Attached to the GPS data is a random identification number generated by the phone every 24 hours. The information is not associated with a particular customer, Apple said.
Apple uses the data to analyze traffic patterns and density, it said. Apple collects such data from customers who have approved the use of location-based capabilities on the phone and who actually use an application that requires GPS.
It’s all in the click-through license, Apple says, adding that if you don’t want your phone to report your location, all you have to do is disable the GPS on your phone. Sheesh.
That’s what Bloomberg is reporting. Apple is denying the report, but their refusal to allow an interview of the engineer in question speaks volumes.
A few days ago I commented that I thought Apple’s refusal to put the iPhone 4 out for beta testing is substantially responsible for the trouble they are having now. The Wall Street Journal backs up my contention:
The electronics giant kept such a shroud of secrecy over the iPhone 4′s development that the device didn’t get the kind of real-world testing that would have exposed such problems in phones by other manufacturers, said people familiar with the matter.
The iPhones Apple sends to its carrier partners for testing are “stealth” phones that disguise a new device’s shape and some of its functions, people familiar with the matter said. Those test phones are specifically designed so the phone can’t be touched, which made it hard to catch the iPhone 4′s antenna problem.
Apple gave its carrier partners far less time to test the iPhone 4 before its launch and gave them significantly fewer devices to test than other handset makers, people familiar with the matter said. AT&T Inc., Apple’s exclusive partner in the U.S., has until recently taken the brunt of criticism for dropped calls on Apple phones.
For what it’s worth, I like my iPhone 4 and I don’t plan to return it. I have had dropped calls, though; whether they would have dropped with my old iPhone 3G, I cannot say.
Consumer Reports says that the iPhone 4′s antenna problem is real, and many are saying that Apple is going to be forced to do a recall. I agree that Apple is doing themselves real damage in the way they responding to this problem, particularly with their ridiculous contention that this is somehow a software problem. I think this Yahoo column puts it best:
Some possibilities:
There really is an antenna problem, and the signal strength really is going down. That that strength is also being misreported is neither here nor there.
There is no antenna problem, but touching the death spot does something else to the signal which interacts with the signal computation algorithm in such a way as to make the iPhone 4 suddenly report signal strength accurately.
Touching that spot on the iPhone 4 causes the machine to take a long hard look at itself and be more honest about what’s really going on.
Apple apparently wants us to believe #2, despite giving no explanation (plausible or otherwise) for how it could be so.
I think Apple has created this problem for themselves with their crazy dedication to secrecy. The problem was discovered immediately when they released the phone. All they had to do was put the phone out in beta and none of this would have happened.
How awesome is nuclear power? You can extract nuclear fuel from coal ash:
ONE of the factoids trotted out from time to time by proponents of nuclear power is that conventional coal-burning power stations release more radioactivity into the environment than nuclear stations do. The reason is that the ash left over when coal is burned contains radioactive elements, notably uranium and thorium.
Turn that logic on its head and it suggests that such ash is worth investigating as a source of nuclear fuel. And that is exactly what Sparton Resources, a firm based in Toronto, is doing. It has signed a deal with the China National Nuclear Corporation (CNNC), the authority that runs the country’s nuclear-power stations, to recover uranium from coal ash at a site in Lincang, in Yunnan province.
Uranium is usually extracted from ore that contains 1,000 or more parts per million (ppm) of the element. The Lincang coal ash holds much less, about 300ppm. That said, it does not need to be mined—which brings costs down. Sparton says it can extract a kilogram of uranium for $77 or less. Uranium’s spot price is now near $90 a kilo. That is not a huge margin, but it is a profit nonetheless.
The California state controller (a Democrat) says that California’s computer system is incapable of complying with the governor’s order to cut most state workers’ pay to minimum wage. He also says it would take 27 months to develop the technology to do it.
I’m pretty sure that mankind has already developed the technology to alter wages.
It’s oddly cool, but I can’t figure out what it’s supposed to be for. It doesn’t look suitable for the disabled, and for the able-bodied it doesn’t look any better than walking.
A major security failure at AT&T, exposing 114 thousand 3G iPad owners, including the White House Chief of Staff. According to Gawker, the failure leaked not only personal information, but also the iPads’ authentication codes, which may have enabled more serious breaches.
In other news, iPads are becoming extremely popular at the White House. Ugh.
I expect this will increase the cries for a non-AT&T iPhone:
In time for the widely expected launch of a new iPhone model, carrier AT&T Inc. is pulling in the reins on data usage by its customers with smart phones and iPads.
The sole U.S. carrier of the iPhone is introducing two new data plans, starting June 7, with limits on data consumption. They’ll replace the $30 per month plan with unlimited usage that it has required for all smart phones, including the iPhone. . .
Current AT&T subscribers will be allowed to keep the unlimited plan, even if they renew their contracts. But all new subscribers will have to choose one of the two new plans.
What’s amusing is the part where AT&T implies they’re doing us a favor.
UPDATE: Daniel Indiviglio says they really are doing us a favor: most iPhone users don’t use anywhere near 2GB a month. I suppose that’s true; I was being overly harsh. But I still don’t like the idea: (1) Most iPhone users probably have no idea how much data they transfer. (2) It’s reasonable to pay a premium not to worry about it. (3) If an app goes haywire, you have no good way of knowing it and the overage charges are steep.
UPDATE: I’m going to reverse myself partially and say that this might be a good idea, if Apple gives us a good way to monitor our usage. I want to be able to track my data usage so I know if I’m using too much, and not just when I’m about to reach my cap. Also, I want to be able to set a hard cap that the phone won’t exceed without my say-so, to protect me against rogue apps.
I still think that its funny that AT&T is pretending they’re doing us a favor. We may have reason to accept this change, but it’s obvious that AT&T is doing this because their network is unable to deliver on their implicit promises.
In my last post, I argued that the network-neutrality proposal being pushed by the FCC is deliberately vague, and would give the FCC the power to do whatever it feels like. Consequently, to avoid costly litigation, ISPs would find it necessary to treat all packets identically, despite claims that the proposal would not do so.
I framed my post as a response to an open letter to the FCC written by Vint Cerf (often called the “father of the internet”) and others. Yesterday, Cerf (or someone identifying himself as him) wrote me to say:
Your blog offers nothing constructive. Have you a proposition?
Thanks for asking! Yes. I have two proposals. The first one will be no surprise to regular readers of this space, but I suspect that Cerf is not, so I’ll go through that one first.
My first proposal is: let people do what they want. The broadband providers own the wire/fiber; let them use it as they see fit. If they do something stupid, like block access to certain sites, allow the market to punish them accordingly. This proposal is very easy to implement, as it means preserving the status quo.
As I’ve written before, the threat of broadband providers shaking down content providers and blocking their sites if they don’t pay is entirely hypothetical. (The threat of government overreach, on other hand, is not.) No broadband provider is doing this now, and I see the likelihood of anyone doing it in the future as very slim. One reason providers are unlikely to try such a thing is the history of the Comcast incident. Some people suggest that the incident proves that the broadband companies are a danger to the free flow of information. Actually, the incident proves just the opposite. (First of all, Comcast was trying to improve user performance, and was simply doing it in a stupid way, but that’s not the point. The market does not require that participants be angels, which they most certainly are not.) Customers got angry when they found out that Comcast was throttling BitTorrent, and Comcast was forced to back down. The market process worked exactly as it is supposed to.
I don’t personally see the need for more than this, but many people do. Some simply want to extend government control over the internet, but others are in earnest.
For people in the latter category, I have a second suggestion: Use the power of the market to force broadband providers to commit to neutrality. The best way to do this would have been to trademark the term “internet” and not permit a broadband provider to use the term unless they abide by standards from some established body like the IETF. That way, network neutrality could be enacted by that standards body. Its decisions would be unlikely to stifle innovation because (1) it’s an open body, (2) it’s not run by the government, and (3) any future standards for Quality of Service would probably go through that body anyway.
Importantly, any broadband provider would be free to ignore the standard, but then they would be unable to market their product as internet service. In order to make a profit, they would need to convince customers that they were offering something better. If they were blocking sites that refused a shakedown, they would have a hard time making that case. On the other hand, if they were providing a new innovation forbidden by an ossified standards body, they probably could make the case.
It’s much too late to trademark the term “internet” now, but we can still do something similar: Have a standards body offer a network-neutrality seal-of-approval to providers that abide by neutrality. Customers would have to be taught to look for the seal, but I don’t think that would be a problem. If Google and others were to take the money that they are spending to lobby the government and instead spend it to advertise a neutrality seal, I think they would have a very easy time making the sale. (And if they couldn’t, that might just mean that the public doesn’t care about network neutrality.)
The broadband providers would be delighted to cooperate because (1) currently they would all receive the seal, and (2) it would lift the threat of government action.
This model has succeeded in the past. For example, Underwriters Laboratories is a private organization that has been certifying products (mostly electrical) for safety for over a century. No one is required to abide by their standards, but those denied the seal have a hard time selling their products.
So that’s my proposal: let free people do what free people will do, and leave the government out of it.
I was surprised to learn of a letter that Vint Cerf and others wrote to the FCC in support of network neutrality last October. Cerf wrote:
One persistent myth is that “network neutrality” somehow requires that all packets be treated identically, that no prioritization or quality of service is permitted under such a framework, and that network neutrality would forbid charging users higher fees for faster speed circuits. To the contrary, we believe such features are permitted within a “network neutral” framework, so long they are not applied in an anti-competitive fashion.
I was surprised by this, because my understanding is that’s exactly what network neutrality is. But rather than argue semantics, let’s go to the FCC’s proposed rules and see what they say. How do you write a rule that dictates that all traffic must be treated equally, while still allowing you to treat some traffic differently than other traffic where appropriate?
You can’t. So here’s what they say instead:
Subject to reasonable network management, a provider of broadband Internet access service must treat lawful content, applications, and services in a nondiscriminatory manner.
There are two keys phrases here, “reasonable network management” and “nondiscriminatory”. The latter is not defined at all. The former purports to be defined, but the definition is circular and in any case it leaves open the definition of “reasonable”:
Reasonable network management consists of:
(a) reasonable practices employed by a provider of broadband Internet access service to:
(i) reduce or mitigate the effects of congestion on its network or to address quality-of-service concerns;
(ii) address traffic that is unwanted by users or harmful;
(iii) prevent the transfer of unlawful content; or
(iv) prevent the unlawful transfer of content; and
(b) other reasonable network management practices.
So we can see that the FCC’s rule is no rule at all, because it never defines “nondiscriminatory” or “reasonable”. So how is the FCC going to enforce a policy that is ill-defined? The rule doesn’t say, but the FCC’s chairman Julius Genachowski explained at a speech at the Brookings Institution in September 2009 (page 13):
I will propose that the FCC evaluate alleged violations of the non-discrimination principal [sic] as they arise on a case by case basis, recognizing that the internet is an extraordinarily complex and dynamic system. This approach within the framework I am proposing today will allow the Commission to make reasoned, fact based determinations based on the internet before it, not based on the internet of years passed or guesses about how the internet will evolve.
Here’s the rub. Genachowski recognizes that there is no way to make a rule that ensures the good intended consequences of network neutrality while averting the bad unintended consequences. It’s good that he recognizes that, since legislators and regulators typically don’t, but what he proposes is even worse. He proposes, essentially, that there be no well-defined rule at all. Instead, the FCC will decide what’s okay on a case-by-case basis, using nothing but vague principles as a guide.
Returning to Cerf’s letter, he writes:
Many now-successful companies have deployed their services on the Internet without the need to negotiate special arrangements with Internet Service Providers, and it’s crucial that future innovators have the same opportunity. We are advocates for “permissionless innovation” that does not impede entrepreneurial enterprise.
I wholeheartedly agree with the principle of “permissionless innovation”, but that’s exactly not what the FCC’s policy would ensure. It does require that future innovators negotiate their innovations; it just makes the other party to the negotiation the FCC rather than ISPs.
Moreover, while the prospect of an ISP standing in the way of innovation is purely hypothetical, the prospect of a government regulator standing in the way of innovation is nigh inevitable. Those with political connections will have their way and any innovation that threatens them will be stamped out. Today’s innovator is tomorrow’s entrenched interest.
A few brave innovators may try to run the FCC gauntlet, but, for the most part, technology companies will avoid costly battles with government regulators. Rather than innovating, they will simply adopt a policy that they know will pass muster. And that means treating every packet the same.
That’s why Cerf is wrong. His internet expertise is unquestioned, but his faith in government regulators is naive. Empowering a government agency to pass judgement on future internet innovation is a terrible idea.
A study finds that television viewers with DVRs still watch live TV almost all the time (85%). I find this simply astonishing. I don’t even know when the programs I watch come on.
Google Inc. said an internal investigation has discovered that the roving vans the company uses to create its online mapping services were mistakenly collecting data about websites people were visiting over wireless networks.
The Internet giant said it would stop collecting Wi-Fi data from its StreetView vans, which workers drive to capture street images and to locate Wi-Fi networks. The company said it would dispose of the data it had accidentally collected.
Alan Eustace, senior vice president of engineering and research for Google, wrote in a blog post that the company uncovered the mistake while responding to a German data-protection agency’s request for it to audit the Wi-Fi data, amid mounting concerns that Google’s practices violated users’ privacy.
Google had previously said it was collecting the location of Wi-Fi hot spots from its StreetView vehicles, but not the information being transmitted over those networks by users.
“It’s now clear that we have been mistakenly collecting samples of payload data from open (i.e. non-password-protected) Wi-Fi networks, even though we never used that data in any Google products,” wrote Mr. Eustace. “We are profoundly sorry for this error and are determined to learn all the lessons we can from our mistake.”
They say it was accidental, and maybe it was (although we have no way to know). But that doesn’t let them off the hook. Even in the most benign reading, this is a company that collects so much data that it can accidentally spy on you.
I also think they need to explain in greater detail how they are going to dispose of the data.
If I’m understanding this WSJ story right, the FCC really is going to go ahead and claim that the internet is a telephone system so they can regulate it.
My distrust of Google had recently started to wane a little, but it’s back now. The Register reports:
Google’s roving Street View spycam may blur your face, but it’s got your number. The Street View service is under fire in Germany for scanning private WLAN networks, and recording users’ unique Mac (Media Access Control) addresses, as the car trundles along. . .
Google CEO Eric Schmidt recently said internet users shouldn’t worry about privacy unless they have something to hide.
I guess I should have expected this. If you’re determined to nationalize the internet, why let defeat in Congress and in court stop you?
The U.S. could regain its authority to pursue both network neutrality and widespread access to broadband by formally reclassifying Internet access as “telecommunications services,” a former adviser to President Obama said in a published report on Sunday.
Susan Crawford, who was a special assistant to the President for science, technology and innovation policy, wrote in the New York Times that, before it can reclassify Internet access, the U.S. Federal Communications Commission has to prove “good reason”. . .
Crawford said if Internet access is reclassified as “telecommunications services” rather than as “information services,” it would make it easier to tell providers of high-speed Internet access what to do.
To edit your profile on Verizon’s web site, you need both your password and the answer to your “secret” question. I don’t think they are correctly understanding the principle behind the secret question.
Since secret questions are insecure and I never lose passwords, I often put random junk into the secret question field. That worked out poorly for me in this case.
Wired has an article about Apple’s upcoming iPhone OS 4.0. The good news is it will support multitasking. The bad news, multitasking won’t work on the original iPhone or the 3G. Boo.
The Court of Appeals for DC has ruled unanimously that the FCC does not have the power to impose network neutrality:
A federal appeals court ruled Tuesday that the Federal Communications Commission lacks the authority to require broadband providers to give equal treatment to all Internet traffic flowing over their networks.
The ruling by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia is a big victory for Comcast Corp., the nation’s largest cable company. It had challenged the FCC’s authority to impose so-called “net neutrality” obligations on broadband providers.
The ruling also marks a serious setback for the FCC, which is trying to officially set net neutrality regulations.
This is a good thing for technology, as I explain here and here. It’s obviously a good thing for property rights, and it’s also good for the rule of law, as the FCC had no authority to do what it was trying to do:
Because the FCC “has failed to tie its assertion” of regulatory authority to any actual law enacted by Congress, the agency does not have the authority to regulate an Internet provider’s network management practices, wrote Judge David Tatel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit.
Barack Obama was asked when he was in Copenhagen whether a provision by which countries could peek into each others’ assessment processes was strong enough to be sure there was no cheating. He answered reassuringly that “we can actually monitor a lot of what takes place through satellite imagery”. That statement conjured up thoughts of the sort of cold-war satellite system that America used to identify and count Russian missiles. But the president was being a bit previous; at the moment, no such system exists, because America’s Orbiting Carbon Observatory (OCO), a satellite that would have fulfilled the role, was lost on launch this time last year.
(Emphasis mine.)
It’s good to know that the president is making decisions based on the best scientific advice.
A data breach at the National Archives and Records Administration is more serious than previously believed. It involved sensitive personal information of 250,000 Clinton administration staff members, job applicants and White House visitors, as well as the Social Security number of at least one daughter of former Vice President Al Gore.
The data, which included more than 100,000 Social Security numbers, was stored on a computer hard drive that the NARA discovered missing last April from a data processing room in Maryland. It’s unknown if the drive was lost or stolen. . .
The NARA was harshly criticized for another potential data breach it may have suffered involving the records of 70 million U.S. military veteran. The records were on a defective hard drive that the agency sent to the drive vendor for repair. The agency failed to delete data on the drive before sending it to the vendor. When the vendor determined the drive couldn’t be repaired, it passed the drive to another company for recycling.
But don’t worry, they’ll be much more careful with our medical records.
LED traffic lights save electricity, but they generate less heat. That is a problem in colder climates: the cold bulbs allow snow and ice to accumulate and obscure the light. This is being blamed for a fatal accident in Oswego, Illinois. The solution being adopted is to send out road crews to clean the lights, which eliminates some or all of the cost savings. But at least they’re creating “green jobs”!
THERMODYNAMIC POSTSCRIPT: Above I said “but they generate less heat”, but I could just as well have said “because they generate less heat”. All the energy a bulb uses has to go somewhere. LED’s use less electricity precisely because they don’t generate as much waste heat. (LEDs also don’t waste energy on light invisible to the human eye, but I don’t think that’s much of a factor.)
LEDs and fluorescent bulbs are cold by design. Traffic light failures are a dramatic consequence, but there is a more commonplace one. In a home that uses electric heat, LEDs and fluorescent bulbs will save no energy during the heating months. Any heat that is not generated by lighting will be made up joule-for-joule by electric heaters, coming out precisely even. As a result, estimates of the energy saved by such lighting are substantially overstated (again, in homes with electric heat).
I’ve written on this blog before (here and here) that I am against network neutrality, because it is a technically flawed and almost universally misunderstood solution to an as-yet nonexistent problem.
Now people are beginning to call for “search neutrality”. Technically there is no relation at all between network and search neutrality, but the two are likely to become politically entangled. The idea to search neutrality is that search providers (i.e., Google) ought not use their power deliberately to direct customers to some services in which they have a financial interest (particularly theirs) over others.
There are two immediate differences we can observe between search neutrality and network neutrality. First, there are no technical problems with search neutrality. Unlike network neutrality, search neutrality would not hurt network performance or stifle innovation. Second, search neutrality is targeted at a problem that actually exists. Google does use its search influence to direct customers to its own services.
Is search neutrality therefore a good idea? That’s not so clear.
Generally I’m against government intervention in the marketplace, but I make an exception in the case of monopolistic (and oligopolistic) behavior. It is appropriate for the government to take action to protect individuals in non-competitive markets. Of course, in most cases, monopolies exists because of the action of the government. In such cases, the government should simply remove the barriers to entry that it has erected itself. There also exists a few instances of natural monopolies, typically utilities. The science of regulating public utilities to ensure efficient resource allocation is fairly well-understood.
Then there’s the rarest of all cases, in which a company establishes a dominant position through superior business practices or technical insight that, for some reason, other companies are unable to duplicate. It’s impossible to make any universal rule in such a case, but I would make two related observations: First, the government always seems to overreact in such circumstances. (Witness the government’s persecution of IBM and the ham-handed AT&T breakup.) Second, such circumstances are invariably far more temporary than people seem to suppose.
On general libertarian principles, I’m against forcing Google to order its search results in any fashion other than how they choose. With a 65% market share, Google isn’t a monopolistic player yet, so there’s no need yet to contemplate an exception on such grounds. Furthermore, it would be very hard to fashion a rule that would prevent search rigging while permitting legitimate innovation.
On the other hand, Google should be pressured to reveal their methodology. Their official blog contains a weak explanation of why their purported dedication to openness does not apply to their search algorithm. Basically they say that their page-ranking algorithm is not robust (my words, not theirs) and publishing it would make it easy for people to manipulate it. That might be so. But there is no reason why they shouldn’t publish the exceptions they make to their page-ranking algorithm. The only reason I see for keeping the exceptions secret is their publication might make Google look bad.
POSTSCRIPT: When I say that Google isn’t a monopolistic player yet, I’m referring of course to web search. They are a monopolistic player in the business of stealing books. Astonishingly, a federal court has not only given Google approval to steal copyrighted books, it has also made Google the only one that can do so. (Again, most monopolies exist due to government action.) There’s also other good reason to dislike Google, such as its growing record of censorship. So if Google did face some government persecution, my sympathy for them would be limited.
A new technology for electricity generation uses osmotic pressure to drive a turbine. It’s not ready for practical use yet, but a Norwegian firm hopes to build a commercial plant by 2015.
It sounds technically cool, but I’m a bit skeptical. The technology works by making fresh water salty. Unfortunately, fresh water is precious in much of the world, while there are other cost-effective ways to generate electricity. It seems like it might be reasonable to build an osmotic plant where a river meets the sea already, but those areas tend to have ecosystems that environmentalists get exercised about. The article mentions the possibility of a plant between the Red Sea and Dead Sea, where you could move salt water into even saltier water, but how many such places exist?
When I tell people that, they often scoff and offer replies like “so you’re not a programmer then?” and “let me guess, you’re a coding deity or something?” Well let me say, I am a programmer and I am not Codethulu, but in the same manner that Al Gore can fly around the world in a private jet without polluting, I have negated my bad code footprint through the purchase of Bad Code Offsets.
The internet chapter of the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement has leaked, and it’s as bad as many have suspected. BoingBoing summarizes:
ISPs have to proactively police copyright on user-contributed material. This means that it will be impossible to run a service like Flickr or YouTube or Blogger, since hiring enough lawyers to ensure that the mountain of material uploaded every second isn’t infringing will exceed any hope of profitability.
ISPs have to cut off the Internet access of accused copyright infringers or face liability. This means that your entire family could be denied to the internet — and hence to civic participation, health information, education, communications, and their means of earning a living — if one member is accused of copyright infringement, without access to a trial or counsel.
The whole world must adopt US-style “notice-and-takedown” rules that require ISPs to remove any material that is accused — again, without evidence or trial — of infringing copyright. This has proved a disaster in the US and other countries, where it provides an easy means of censoring material, just by accusing it of infringing copyright.
Mandatory prohibitions on breaking DRM, even if doing so for a lawful purpose (e.g., to make a work available to disabled people; for archival preservation; because you own the copyrighted work that is locked up with DRM).
This treaty is being negotiated in secret by the Obama administration, citing national security, if you can believe that:
Last September, the Bush administration defended the unusual secrecy over an anti-counterfeiting treaty being negotiated by the U.S. government, which some liberal groups worry could criminalize some peer-to-peer file sharing that infringes copyrights.
Now President Obama’s White House has tightened the cloak of government secrecy still further, saying in a letter this week that a discussion draft of the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement and related materials are “classified in the interest of national security pursuant to Executive Order 12958.”
Got that? An international treaty is classified due to national security. If that weren’t already a load of crap, the negotiations aren’t so sensitive that they couldn’t invite comment from 42 outside lawyers.
Apparently the ruling hinges on the fact that email is stored outside the home. But snail mail is protected when it’s sitting in a mailbox, or even en route. Why should email be different?
I’m also confused how to reconcile this decision with Warshak v. US, which says email is protected under the Fourth Amendment. Is this just a circuit split?
UPDATE (11/8): To muddy the waters a little bit more, see the correction here. As a non-lawyer it’s now not clear at all what this ruling means, although it still doesn’t sound good.
I like my Kindle, but I’m still happy about Barnes & Noble’s new Nook e-reader. I hope it will push Amazon to make some improvements, particularly something like the Nook’s book-lending feature.
The FCC is preparing to impose network neutrality on the Internet. Despite what the WSJ says in its headline, this is not a boon for consumers and Silicon Valley. I explain why here and here.
The makers of various wireless gadgets (the Kindle, Sirius XM radio, the iPhone) could track down those gadgets when they are stolen, or at least make them useless, but they won’t do it. Apparently they would rather sell content to the new possessor.
Tom Conlon, writing for Popular Science, is worried about the Apple tablet rumors:
It’s been reported by several news outlets that the supposed iTablet will feature a 10-inch touchscreen, both Wi-Fi and 3G data, and a custom ARM processor. It’s already been priced at $800 and even greenlit by none other than His Majesty Steve Jobs for a September release. Not one iota of this has been officially confirmed, but the prospect of a Mac Tablet seems more within reach than ever before.
This is not a good thing. If an Apple tablet is ever actually released, we should all be very concerned for the future of what most of us take for granted today: our digital freedom.
The Apple tablet will likely sit somewhere in between the iPhone and a Mac laptop. But it won’t just blur the line between them—-it will attempt to erase it. This should scare you because it will be the biggest leap yet towards the notion of a completely closed “desktop” operating system.
It seems unlikely that closed operating systems could conquer the open ones. People who have been free are usually loath to give up their freedom. Of course, it’s not unprecedented either.
The White House’s acting cybersecurity czar [Melissa Hathaway] announced her resignation Monday, in a setback to the Obama administration’s efforts to better protect the computer networks critical to national security and the global economy.
The resignation highlights the difficulty the White House has had following through on its cybersecurity effort. President Barack Obama first outlined his cybersecurity plans in a high-profile speech May 29, announcing his intention to create a top White House cybersecurity post — a position he has yet to fill. . .
In the past year, intelligence officials have grown increasingly concerned about Chinese and Russian cyberspies surveilling U.S. infrastructure and military networks.
People familiar with the matter said Ms. Hathaway has been “spinning her wheels” in the White House, where the president’s economic advisers sought to marginalize her politically. . .
Ms. Hathaway had initially been considered a leading contender to fill the cyber post permanently. She lost favor with the president’s economic team after she said it should consider options for regulating some private-sector entities to ensure they secure their networks, said cybersecurity specialists familiar with the discussions. Being a holdover from the Bush administration didn’t help either, they said.
In February, the White House tapped Ms. Hathaway, a senior intelligence official who had launched President George W. Bush’s cybersecurity initiative, to lead a 60-day cybersecurity policy review. Ms. Hathaway completed her review in April, but the White House spent another 60 days debating the wording of her report and how to structure the White House cyber post. National Economic Adviser Larry Summers argued forcefully that his team should have a say in the work of the new cyber official.
If our enemies bring down our computer infrastructure, at least we can be reassured that cybersecurity wasn’t run by a Bush administration holdover, and that President Obama’s economic team had their say.
I’ll accept his apology as genuine, but it doesn’t entirely settle the matter. The troubling thing about the incident wasn’t so much Amazon’s action, but their capability to do it. Bezos can’t put this back in the box, now that we know about that capability. Bezos needs to explain what Amazon will do to protect the ebooks that we already own.
It seems Amazon has the power to delete books from customers’ kindles, and they recently exercised that power. To make the incident a little more poignant, the deleted books were George Orwell works, including 1984 and Animal Farm.
The publisher that was selling the books did not have the rights to do so, and Amazon refunded customers’ money, so it’s hard to say that what Amazon did in this incident was wrong. What is troubling is that they have the power to do it.
With an ordinary book, readers are protected by owning a physical copy. A lawsuit or a change in heart by the publisher might take a book out of print, but it cannot recall the books that are already out there. The idea that an existing book might be made to disappear is very troubling.
It’s not a hypothetical worry either, as demonstrated by the recent affair of the Encyclopedia of Christian Civilization, whose publisher, Wiley-Blackwell, abruptly cancelled publication of the work after it had already gone to press, recalled its existing copies, and pulped its entire run. The reason for the action is unclear, and it is credibly alleged that it was because the work was “too Christian.”
One inherent protection that free speech has from censorship is that it’s hard to find and collect all the copies of a banned book. It’s very disappointing that Amazon decided to build that functionality into the kindle. Outside the western democracies (indeed, probably even in Canada), this functionality will certainly be used to enforce censorship. Even more troubling, it will be used silently to revise existing works to correct politically incorrect material. That’s a development worthy of George Orwell.
POSTSCRIPT: If you’re a kindle owner, and you don’t want to trust Amazon to archive your kindle books (as this incident shows you should not), you can do it yourself. Using the USB cable, you can connect your kindle to your computer and copy off its books. Those books are DRMed, so you can only read them on your kindle, but you can restore them if they’re deleted. It possible that it might not work in this sort of case; Amazon might have included a revocation list in the kindle, but I doubt they went so far.
UPDATE: For once, I beat Glenn Reynolds to the punch. His take is much the same as mine, except he’s not focusing on the service this does for tyrants. Also, Hot Air says that it looks as though Amazon’s action is not permitted under its Terms of Use.
Amazon effectively acknowledged that the deletions were a bad idea. “We are changing our systems so that in the future we will not remove books from customers’ devices in these circumstances,” Mr. Herdener said.
The Iranian regime has developed, with the assistance of European telecommunications companies, one of the world’s most sophisticated mechanisms for controlling and censoring the Internet, allowing it to examine the content of individual online communications on a massive scale.
Interviews with technology experts in Iran and outside the country say Iranian efforts at monitoring Internet information go well beyond blocking access to Web sites or severing Internet connections.
Instead, in confronting the political turmoil that has consumed the country this past week, the Iranian government appears to be engaging in a practice often called deep packet inspection, which enables authorities to not only block communication but to monitor it to gather information about individuals, as well as alter it for disinformation purposes, according to these experts.
The monitoring capability was provided, at least in part, by a joint venture of Siemens AG, the German conglomerate, and Nokia Corp., the Finnish cellphone company.
The Iranian people sure did, though. Iranians have organized a boycott of Nokia, and an Iranian paper claims that Nokia’s sales have been halved as a result of the boycott.
The most important developments in mobile technology have required creative funding streams that have necessitated carrier exclusivity agreements. For example, the iPhone’s “natural” cost would be well north of $600, were Apple not able to create a subsidy for purchasers through an exclusive partnership with AT&T.
Exclusive and exciting technology generates more subscribers to the carrier, which allows it to subsidize the technology on the front end. Further, exclusivity creates incentives for new phones to be developed in partnership with competing carriers. (Case in point: the Palm Pre.)
Enter the dark clouds of FCC regulation. The Commission is set to determine whether these private contracts between providers and manufacturers are “anticompetitive” and “contrary to the public interest,” which would be a reversal of its own decision in 1992. Unfortunately, the Senate seems eager for such a reversal; today the Commerce Committee is holding hearings on the subject.
If the iPhone had cost $600 it never would have existed. With this regulation, the next great idea won’t exist.
The new “smart” power grid we’re building with stimulus funds has buffer overrun vulnerabilities in its software that an attacker can use to bring down the power grid.
As prices fell and cable and satellite firms began to bundle DVRs with other services, their popularity soared. According to Nielsen, a media-research outfit, 29% of American homes now have one. . .
Yet those households do not use them nearly as much as one might expect. Families with DVRs seem to spend 15-20% of their viewing time watching pre-recorded shows, and skip only about half of all advertisements. This means only about 5% of television is time-shifted and less than 3% of all advertisements are skipped. Mitigating that loss, people with DVRs watch more television.
Tivo is great because it puts me, rather than the broadcasters, in charge of my viewing habits. To a good approximation, I watch only pre-recorded shows. And why would you watch commercials if you don’t have to? My pre-schooler complains that the TV is broken if a commercial ever comes on. How is it possible that most people are happy to watch programs when they are told to watch, and are happy to be interrupted every few minutes? I don’t get it.
The AP has the tragic and troubling story of Australian teen’s death after becoming lost in the wilderness. He called for help on his cell phone, but the 911-equivalent operators were focused more on satisfying the demands of the software than on getting him help.
Mandatory fields when entering data into software are always annoying, but this time they cost a boy his life. Until the day comes (possibly never) that computers can exercise sound judgement, humans must be able to override their demands, particularly in systems on which lives depend.
Rep. Christopher Smith (R-NJ) is making another try at the Global Online Freedom Act, which is intended to keep US companies from assisting with oppression in other countries. The legislation is prompted in part by Yahoo’s cooperation in identifying Chinese dissidents, which resulted in long prison sentences for the dissidents.
Assuming the 2009 version is similar to the 2007 one, the legislation is pretty mild, actually. It does very little on the censorship front, merely requiring that companies keep track of their censorship and report it to the US government. It also forbids them from blocking web sites supported by the US government.
It does better in regard to personally identifiable information, prohibiting its release in Internet-restricting countries, except for legitimate law enforcement purposes, which specifically do not include “control, suppression, or punishment of peaceful expression of political or religious opinion.” It also gives victims a right of action against the company in federal court, without regard to citizenship. All this is limited, however, by an authority given to the president to waive the provisions for any country.
Smith’s last effort passed the House Foreign Affairs Committee in 2007 and was placed on the calendar, but never reached the House floor (which was controlled by Democrats).
Posted by K. Crary 
